Can I access my old raspberry pi OS now that I have installed Retropie?

Nightfire

If Raspbian was installed on the SD card, then you used W32DiskImager to write RetroPie to the SD card...Raspbian is gone.
W32DiskImager is a program that writes a single image file to a disk. It doesn't do split partitioning or anything like that.
RetroPie is it's own system (without a desktop GUI). I'm not sure if repositories are in place to be able to install desktop environments to RetroPie or not (I would guess not though).
If you want to be able to have a desktop along with RetroPie/EmulationStation, you are going to need to install RetroPie/EmulationStation ON TOP OF Raspbian. See Here: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/manual-installation

mikeyb

@herb_fargus Thanks for the clarification.

mikeyb

@Nightfire Thank you Nightfire, much appreciated.

After I installed everything I cannot access the emulation station.

I used the Manage Package option and Installed the Core Packages.
I tried with binary and from source options. After both installs finished
there were no prompts. I went to the folders and saw retro pie folders
installed.

I don't see any way that I can open the emulation station.
I checked back to see if they were installed and yes they were.

Nightfire

@mikeyb

So you have Raspbian now with RetroPie installed on top of that?

EmulationStation has to be started from the terminal as far as I know. Open terminal and type 'emulationstation' and see if it comes up then.

mikeyb

@Nightfire Yup I have retropie installed on top of lxde. I typed emulationstation in the terminal and got this weird message
in the terminal.

x is running. Please shutdown x in order to mitigate problems with losing keyboard
input. For example log out from LXDE.

mikeyb

Perhaps If I make adjustments in the RetroPie-Setup Script under Configuration/Tools. Under the Autostart section > Manually edit/opt/retropie/configs/autostart.sh

Nightfire

Yeah, X-Server may need to be disabled for EmulationStation to work correctly. I guess you may need to have the Pi boot to CLI to make it easy. Then you can choose after boot to startup EmulationStation or to startup the GUI.

So if you go into either:
terminal and type 'raspi-config' then 'boot options', you can tell it to boot to the CLI
menu->preferences->raspberry pi config then there will be a boot option

https://www.modmypi.com/blog/boot-to-command-line-raspbian-jessie

Then when you're at CLI after boot, either type 'emultationstation' to boot EmulationStation or type 'startx' to boot to the LXDE desktop.

Hopefully this should sort you out

mikeyb

Ahh thanks, I think I'm beginning to understand how this all works. Though I say this loosely.

I tried typing in the terminal sudo service lightdm stop to stop X-server or LDXE.
After which when I restarted i booted into a grey screen, which when exited sent me to open box.

I typed emulationstation in terminal but received same error as my previous thread.
I now have logged back into LDXE. Back to the drawing board.

I guess I can change my boot to log into CLI and type emulationstation and see if that works.

mikeyb

Thanks Nightfire! booting in CLI worked like a charm. All I have to do is type sudo service lightdm start and I am back
into LXDE.

Only problem now that when i am in emulationstation, I only have access to Retro pie 13 games.
For some reason I can't access all of the other console games. However I have put all of the game ROMs in their respective system folders. Maybe I have to re-install?

Nightfire

@mikeyb Hmm...how did you transfer the games over? Did you enable samba shares and do it that way? Are each system's games in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ ?

Cause yeah the systems should show up in emulationstation as soon as there are rom files in those folders.